The Ben & Jerry’s in my neighbourhood was out. Too big a risk that my Aunt Josie who spent her whole life at Second Cup shmoozing clients over moccaccinos might spot me, and then I’d catch hell. So I hopped on the metro and headed downtown where B&J’s had three scoop shops to choose from.
Even though it was a weekday afternoon, the streets downtown were jumping. It always worked that way when a freak summery day popped up out of the slush at the tail end of winter. The boots and the Kanuks and the gloves would have to come back out of the closet the next day but in the meantime the weather had everyone pumped. The café owners hustled their tables and chairs out onto their terraces chop-chop and the sidewalk musicians and jewellery hawkers crawled out from wherever it is they hibernate. For no good reason that I can remember looking back, I settled on the Ben & Jerry’s near Concordia. I suppose it was the first one I passed and I just tacked myself onto the end of the line on autopilot.
The line snaked way down Crescent but it moved along pretty snappy. And even when it stalled out every once in a while, it didn’t bother me. I was AWOL and soaking up rays. Life was good. I’d get there when I’d get there. No worries. There was a cluster of slightly older Traf girls just ahead of me who’d flounced down the hill for the event and they deigned to suck me into their group. They had their kilts hiked up after-school style revealing huge tracts of bare thigh and their ties were loosened come-hitherishly at their throats. They were gloriously pouty. The sun glinting off their braces blinded me, but in a good way. When they offered me a cigarette I was able to take my drags without embarrassing myself. No coughing. No gagging. I’d been snitching from my mum’s stock for a year or so just to practice up for an event such as this and finally it paid off. To see me you’d have sworn I’d popped out of the womb with an Export A between my lips. I shot out a lasso of smoke that curved around them in an embrace my pipe cleaner arms would never have had nerve enough to attempt on girls like these. They looked like they’d been teleported in from some upscale new planet that the ratty old science textbooks at my school had yet to register the existence of.
When we finally reached the counter to put in our orders, way too soon to suit me, I lost track of them temporarily. See, their server knew his way around an ice cream scoop. Mine was brain dead. By the time she figured out how to get the ball of ice cream to sit on top of the cone without crushing it, my new friends had taken off. But their musky little cloud hung over me even after they’d gone, giving my nostrils a vicious hard-on. Their quick getaway did have me semi-peeved. Would it have killed them to stick around and wait for me? But I guess it was a test to see if their new little lapdog would follow.
Woof woof. It was easy enough to pick up their track. Our kindred hormones were texting each other. The group was heading east on Maisonneuve. I’d catch up with them before my ice cream had even begun to dribble down my fingers.
They turned left onto Mountain and then hung a right onto Sherbrooke. I figured they were heading for the benches on the McGill campus. There were worse places to shlurp a cone and watch the world go by. I was about a block and a half behind them. I didn’t close the gap even though my legs could eat up that much sidewalk no sweat. Why rush? I was at the perfect distance to cop an excellent view of the pendulum action of their asses. It was one of the great miracles of physics.
But it wasn’t long before the rear view lost its pull on me. I was too charged up to see what effect gravity and velocity were having on their forward body parts. I picked up the pace just a bit and by the time they were passing the Ritz I was nearly within shouting distance. This would have been much more useful of course if only I knew their names but we hadn’t yet gotten around to introductions. Since I couldn’t call out to them, that was the moment when I finally decided to step on the gas so I could wedge myself back into their glittery circle. Instead, once I sped up, I slammed smack into the Ritz doorman, cone first. If this were a comic book instead of the serious memoir I’m writing, the balloon above our heads would say SPLAT!*!. The poor guy couldn’t chew me out like he was dying to do because for all he knew I was the spoiled property of some guest at the hotel. Goodbye tip if he didn’t keep it zipped. The most he could do was glower at me from under his visor. Still his glower was impressive. I guess he had a lot of practice working at a place like that. When he abandoned his outdoor post to go into the lobby and sponge himself off, I followed him in to apologize. I wasn’t raised as badly as he figured.
If only I’d kept on trailing those girls, if only I’d gone against my instinct to say sorry to the doorman, if only I hadn’t turned towards the elevator in the Ritz lobby when the ping announced its doors were opening, then I wouldn’t have seen my dad wrapped around that slut planting an epic kiss on her lips, and I’d be on my rocker instead of off it today.
Did I want to tear out of there and crawl in a hole to retch in private? Hell yeah. Trouble was, my legs refused to obey my orders. And then my arms, my hands, my head, they all got caught up in the mutiny. I couldn’t even close my eyes. They were stuck fast on the open setting feeding in an endless stream of images that I had no desire to process. But what else could I do? I was a witness despite myself, chronicler of record of the first step in my family’s disintegration.
Why did it have to be me? Couldn’t he have shown his true colours in front of someone halfway capable of dealing with it? So I was smart in school, so what? They didn’t give classes in this. All I knew on the subject (and what exactly was the subject?) came from TV. Fidelity and in-, guilt, blame, treachery. Scriptwriters knew how to untangle all those threads in twenty-two minutes, not me. I just wanted to take those threads, wrap them around his throat, and strangle the breath out of him.
I sized up Dad’s hook-up while their eyes were still closed, checked out her packaging. She seemed a different style of woman from my mum who was petite, a bit scarce on the flesh. Or maybe Mum wasn’t so brittle back then, and I was just backdating the later version. Anyhow, this woman was lusher, cut full. I earmarked her to be a little younger than Dad, even though I was crap at estimating such things. Looks-wise I couldn’t give her high marks. Not gross, but she wouldn’t turn any heads that one. My mother, the high priestess of damning with faint praise, would have called her presentable. Dressed to sell RRSPs or cemetery plots.
Her plainness nagged at me. It forced me to re-adjust my first call. A slut? Nah. She looked, well, regular. Standard issue suburban. Neighbourish. I couldn’t pin most of the blame on her. No way had she bedazzled him armed with her short stack of attractions. Not that it would have made all that much difference who initiated it, I guess, but at least Dad being lured in by a cover-girl type I could understand, even if I couldn’t forgive. Whatever this was, though, totally freaked me out.
They finally came up for air. Dad untangled his hand from her hair and repositioned it on the small of her back (towards the low end) to steer her out of the elevator. That much solicitude I’d never seen him show Mum. He must have figured that his wife had a good enough sense of direction to find her own way out of an elevator without any manly leadership needed from him. Out in the lobby he gave her ear a quickie nibble. Hadn’t he noshed on her enough up in their room? Now that was a scene it grossed me out to imagine so I turned off that channel for the time being. It was already hard enough for me to grasp that said unimagined room was situated in the Ritz of all places. What must that have run him? When our family travelled, it was loyal to Econo-Lodge. All five of us squished into two double beds and a fold-out. No liveried doorman ever greeted us when we piled out of the car there. The Ritz was as remote from our family consciousness as booking a stay on Mount Everest. Mum sucked the marrow out of every paycheque Dad brought home as she’d told us kids time and again, intending it to serve as a lesson, and here he was living deluxe. And on his dime. Even in all my mighty ignorance I knew you didn’t go dutch in these circumstances.
The two of them parted company without exchanging a word, which made me think that eit
her (a) they’d said all they had to say upstairs, or (b) this road-show of theirs was a routine, not a one-off, so no words were needed, they had their moves down pat. I didn’t give a flying fuck which letter it was. I was just grateful to see her clear out and put some space between us. Dad gave her a one minute lead towards the front door so they could make their exits separately. A true gentleman he was, my dad. He wouldn’t want to tarnish milady’s reputation. Never one to waste time, Dad profited from his enforced stay in the lobby to check himself out in one of the mirrored columns. He tugged on his shirt cuffs to make them peep out the precise quarter-inch fashion required and then fiddled with his moustache. That was the move that did it.
The Ritz lobby was all-over mirrors. It was going for the Versailles look. Reflections on top of reflections on top of reflections. The hotel’s spray-tanned, tooth-bleached, Bowflexed clientele clearly liked to see itself coming and going. Dad fit right in. When he reached up to his moustache to redirect a stray hair that was pointing up his nose, kissed out of formation no doubt, he caught sight of something he didn’t expect reflected in that mirror. Me.
He wheeled around to confirm the apparition. I would have been happy to oblige him and disappear in a puff of smoke but I was still bolted to the spot. Tough luck Dad. He didn’t say a thing, not even my name. He was too busy making calculations to talk. I could read his brainfeed right through his forehead. I’d seen him with Madame, it told him. No point spinning any tales. Of course he was reading inside of my head too. And since I hadn’t yet reached the age of majority, he had rights as my father not only to read but to muck around in there too. Lay some subliminal groundwork. So he did. Only then did he open his mouth.
“I guess you’ll be needing a note,” he finally said.
And with the promise of that signature I let myself be bought. The whole sorry Ritz episode would be wiped from the record. Shredded. Fini.
If only. That much secrecy turned out to be way too heavy an albatross to dump on the back of a twelve-year-old, and it didn’t take long before I started sinking under the weight of it. I’d never realized before how much energy it took to keep your mouth shut. I had to work at it every single minute of the day. No let-up. School? I couldn’t be bothered anymore. Had to stay focussed on job one. It’s a slog holding a family together all on your own.
Mum was mystified. Where had her old Benjie disappeared to from one day to the next? Poor Mum. We kept her on the run back then. With one hand she’d be practicing life-support on me, and with the other she’d be soft-boiling Dad’s eggs for two minutes and twenty-three seconds every morning as if nothing had changed between them. Maybe I’d screwed up totally agreeing to keep her in the dark. Didn’t she deserve to know Dad was sleeping around (although he swore to me it was over)? Should I tell her? Shouldn’t I? All night every night the PowerPoint slides with the bulleted pros and cons would flick past on my bedroom ceiling, but all I ever got for the exercise was no rest.
Oh, you poor, innocent kid, you’re thinking. He really did a number on you, your dad. The decision was never in your hands. You were like one of those child soldiers. The rebel leader comes up to you holding a Kalashnikov and says my way or the highway, so you salute and say yes sir. That was me and Dad. More or less.
You’d figure things would have taken a turn for the better for me once Dad croaked. I’d be free. But by then the knots he’d tied me up in were too complicated to be unpicked and my future as a write-off was set in stone.
So if Lena thought I would ever again allow myself to be positioned between a husband and wife, she had another think coming. If Morrie was bent on stealing, even if it meant he’d have to live out his days on bread and water, I wasn’t about to advise him otherwise. But in the end, my stance on this issue turned out not to matter.
14
Pall-bearing is a bit like portaging a canoe. You need to round up a set of guys of a similar size. You can’t have one way tall, say, and the others shrimpy so that it puts the coffin off balance and you can hear the corpse shifting and rolling around in there since your ear’s right up against the wood. Same goes for portaging. Everyone of equalish stature so you can hoist the canoe up on your shoulders and have it sit there even-steven while you march it past the rapids. There were height requirements for voyageurs back then. 5’4” tops. It wasn’t as hard to find guys that size as you might imagine. They grew ’em short in those days.
This comparison came to me, I’m ashamed to say, during Lena’s funeral service. Not that I had to worry personally about heaving the coffin up onto my own shoulder. She was cremated, according to her wishes. But my mind wandered off in that direction. I had no control.
It pained me to picture how they’d managed to fit her into that pine box that sat before us in the chapel. I’d have thought she’d need some specialty shape, a trapezoid or something, the way her poor body was twisted and kinked. But it must be that undertakers are on the order of physios or chiropractors. They’re trained to noodge rigid spines and limbs posthumously into submission until they conform to the space restraints of a standard casket. In any event, it was a closed-lid affair as tradition dictated, so we’d never know how they’d jammed her in.
My mum always took the attendance at my dad’s funeral as a testament to what a great guy he was. Overflow seating no less. Paper-man’s had to pull a last minute switcheroo to the heavy-duty chapel so everyone could be comfortably accommodated. Lena’s funeral attendance was tiny. So I guess Mum, the renowned math scholar, had that correlation back-asswards. I was the youngest person there by a mile. A few rickety couples clustered in the front. Afterwards, they kissed Morrie, whispered their consoling words, rubbed him on the back, and then they were gone.
No shiva. Not officially anyway. I offered up my house. Morrie declined. He was right, I suppose. No one at home had ever even heard of him. Too much explaining. And he could hardly welcome callers into his own house, setting up the platters of lox and bagels and mun cookies on plywood panels set across sawhorses in the empty dining room. It would be too shaming to Lena’s memory to let their friends witness what they’d come to. None of them had a clue. Morrie’d made sure of that. He was an master planner, Morrie was.
As soon as he started selling off their possessions, Morrie got to work on a parallel divestment campaign. A human one. Their friends would call up and invite themselves over for a little visit with their dear Lena. Morrie said no. She wasn’t up to it. Again they would call. Again he said no. After four times, maybe five they got the message and cut the cord. It was Lena who lost out most in this arrangement, of course. She was the social animal in the couple. But Morrie made the tough-love judgment call, throwing their friends overboard to keep their pride dry.
All this spilled out during our private shiva. We mourned together up in his fur trade room over a shared bottle of slivovitz. The sharing amounted to me doing the pouring and him doing the swallowing.
“Was there an insurance policy?” I asked him. It was my habit to stick to the practicalities on occasions like this. I never knew what to say over death, couldn’t deliver the normal sympathy formulas with any conviction. Maybe it’s because I maxed out on all those full-of-shit phrases when my dad checked out. For seven days straight after we put him in the ground they kept shovelling the platitudes in my direction until I thought I’d pass out from the stench they gave off. Exemplary father, devoted husband, fine family man. Christ! Irreplaceable, a man of integrity. Stop! Enough! But they misread the look on my face and kept laying it on thicker and thicker, those deluded relatives of mine, those duped friends of my family. Such a mensch he was, they’d whisper to me, a loving arm around my shoulder, assuming they had a receptive audience, a pillar of the community. Shut up already! He was scum. Shut up!
Sorry, sorry, I lost my train of thought. Where was I? Oh yeah, practicalities.
“Was there an insurance policy?”
“What do you think?” Morrie said.
“So you’ll have to sell
the house right away then.”
“It’s a bit premature to be talking for-sale signs on the lawn don’t you think?”
“No, actually, I don’t think. You’ll be needing the income from the house right away, won’t you?”
“My net worth is no worry of yours.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be, except my understanding was that you’re net worthless.”
“I get by.”
“A money pit you always called it. I thought you’d be relieved to be free to dump the place. So you could do more in life than just get by. And it’s not like there’ll be any spare loonies and toonies coming in now that you’re hanging up your cat-burglar skates.”
He looked at me like I’d missed some obvious step in my reasoning.
“You are planning on hanging up your cat-burglar skates, right?” I expected an automatic yes. Instead, he waffled.
“I’ll have to see,” he said.
“What’s to see? I don’t understand. The payout you’d get from the house would cover all your debts and then some. You could relax. Have some cash in your pocket for a change.”
His explanation for choosing to stay on the wrong side of the law had originality going for it if nothing else. “It’s something to do,” he said.
“You mean like suddenly you’re going to turn it into your hobby?”
“What’ll you have me do to fill in the time? Needlepoint?”
“Don’t give me that. You could take advantage of all that extra time to beef up our plan. We both know it needs lots of work yet. You could buckle down to it with no interruptions. Tie up the thousands of loose ends.”
My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur Page 14